We and Love and Food

Post by Lara

8 July 2014

Before Peace Corps, Kevin and I were interested in nutrition inasmuch as we liked good food and tried to incorporate as much variety into our diet as we could.  We planted herbs in our flower bed, joined a CSA, and cooked our own dinner from scratch most nights.  When we came across a fruit or vegetable we didn’t recognize, we would often buy it and figure out how to cook it.  I had a rough idea of which nutrients could be acquired from which kinds of foods, and we did what we could to get all of those, without spending too much mental energy on keeping track.  For what’s it’s worth, though, we did not follow any kind of strict diet—we had a kitchen pantry that was permanently stocked with Oreos, a fridge with a special place set aside for heavy cream, which we cooked with regularly, and we routinely ordered pizza when we didn’t want to cook—all of which I add here to reassure you that although healthy eating was high on our priority list, “junk food” was not absent from our lives, and we definitely weren’t purists of any breed.

 I don’t think that I would have told you then that nutrition was one of my main interests, in part because keeping nourished in the US is not difficult to do, and most Americans do it without making a conscious effort.  It was out on the periphery of my interests.  It wasn’t until I moved to Sierra Leone, experienced an almost total changeover from my old diet to the one I observe now, and saw how important nutrition is when you exit the first world, that I began to see this as a crucial part of my service and my post-Peace Corps life. 

For westerners living in Sierra Leone, staying nourished often means learning not to be picky—a luxury that we seem to have acquired at some point in the last few centuries.  Not liking fish, or too much oil, or onions, are totally normal things in the states, but here, you often have to set that aside and eat what’s sitting in front of you.  Many of the common dishes here are chock-full of vitamins, monounsaturated fats, lean proteins, and fiber—which are wonderful for your health.  Unfortunately, we who are not used to eating dishes swimming in oil and who have been almost conditioned to believe that carb-heavy diets are inherently unhealthy often find ourselves battling those western beliefs as we try to decide what and how much to eat here. 

Sierra Leoneans also have their ideas of what a healthy diet consists of—they know that babies should be fed exclusively breast milk until 6 months, that fish, beans, and other proteins are essential to a complete diet, and that “empty” (or plain) rice has almost no nutritional value.  There are also some interesting myths floating around here.  Almost everyone I know is afraid to eat very fibrous parts of fruits and vegetables—the little spines in pineapples, the skins of peanuts, and eggplant seeds are all taken out of foods before consumed.  This would make more sense to me if it weren’t for the fact that these same people happily gnaw the ends off their chicken bones and have no qualms whatsoever about swallowing about a million fish bones a day as they eat their rice and sauce. 

In our time here, we have attempted to make nutrition a bit easier for volunteers by editing our post’s cook book and supplying information for trainings to help those with a Western view of food to thrive in this much different environment.  We also learned how to cook local dishes in variations that are more palatable for Americans—peanut sauce without fish, potato leaf sauce with a healthy smattering of big broad beans and a handful of garlic cloves, and less oil on the whole.  Ours being an early generation post, we have a rare opportunity to help impact the way our post treats things like nutrition and staying healthy in remote locations—we have jumped at the opportunity and attempted to bring more information that is relevant to our specific country and even depicts seasonal variations in what’s available. We leave plenty of work to be done yet, but we’ve at least helped spread information that can keep Americans healthy living here in Sierra Leone.

Ultimately, no matter where you’re eating, challenges arise that can un-balance a person’s diet. In the Western world, often the main challenge is fulfilling your requirements without exceeding them—a task that daunts a larger number of people now than it ever has before.  In the developing world, eating right is mostly about getting enough of those nutrients that can be tough to come by—protein, vitamins, iron, calcium—and doing so before you fill up on carbs (in Sierra Leone, that’s usually rice).

After we complete our Peace Corps service, I’m planning to pursue a career in health care (likely nursing, though time will tell).  I know that the extreme awareness of what nutrients are in my diet, what’s missing, and how much I need to consume will fade when I’m back in an environment where I can get everything I need without trying, but I hope that the lessons learned here will stay with me, and I hope that the efforts I made here have a positive effect on the health of both volunteers and locals in Sierra Leone in the future.